Flood reveals some lost road history

Reporter-Herald Editorial

Posted:
10/01/2013 08:50:05 AM MDT

If you want to have a good understanding of the challenges facing the contractors rebuilding the flood-ravaged roads of the northern Front Range, you will have to take to the air. Otherwise, there's no way to get far enough to comprehend the scope of the challenge.

According to various officials, U.S. 34 in the Big Thompson canyon and Larimer County Road 43 through Glen Haven were more than four-fifths destroyed. In some parts of the canyon, the river changed course and scoured the roadbed to granite. Either the road or the river will have to be routed.

For some neighborhoods high above the raging waters, such as Storm Mountain and The Retreat, the flooding of September did not cause direct damage to homes, but it might as well have. Without the roads and bridges to get to the homes, they are for many uninhabitable. There's no way to get to jobs, the doctor's office or even to the mailbox.

If there's one small benefit from the flood, however, it's that it has reminded many along the Front Range about the long history of development in the mountains west of the city. For more than 100 years, the Colorado settlers have been looking to build their escape from the city in the hills. And they created many more routes to the backcountry than are on the map.

Some of those "roads" are getting publicity this week -- back ways to Storm Mountain through Buckhorn Canyon and Bobcat Ridge, and a possible back way to Estes Park through Rattlesnake Park.

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To call them roads would be an excess, however. In many spots, they are rutted and rocky paths that not even a four-wheeler all-terrain vehicle could navigate. Trails would be a better description.

But before local residents get too excited about state or county crews improving the roads to a better condition, they should know that even in the best conditions they would still be inappropriate for most, if not all, commercial vehicles. In the wintertime, they would be a snowplow driver's worst nightmare.

That being said, county officials should be cataloging not only the roads being used now by those affected by the floods but also other routes in the mountains that might be needed in the future. Back ways to Pingree Park, Red Feather Lakes and points west might be needed in the future.